This disclosure generally relates to determining content item values and particularly to optimizing the determination of the content item values to save resources of an online system.
Publishers can communicate content to users on digital platforms such as webpages or applications. A publisher's webpage may include content that is native to the publisher, as well as content items (e.g., including text, images, video, etc.) from various other domains or systems (e.g., online systems or third party systems). For a given opportunity to display a content item in a webpage, the publisher may request content items from different systems. Based on responses from the different systems, the publisher determines to display a content item from a selected system. The publisher may receive a contribution from the selected system for displaying the content item.
An online system typically has access to large amounts of information describing characteristics of users of the online system and actions performed by the users. Because of the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by such online systems, an online system may determine that particular users are likely to be interested in or interact with certain content items. Thus, the online system may want to provide these content items for display to the users on a publisher's webpage or application. However, the online system may need to compete with other third party systems that also want to provide content items for display on the publisher's webpage or application. It is challenging and desirable for the online system to increase the likelihood that publishers will select content items from the online system for display, and to achieve this goal while efficiently using available resources.